Why should any person have to "suffer" to bail out a system that's crashed out of control? Was the collapse of the banks my fault? Why am I having to pay for it?

People - like myself, as it happens - on relatively low public sector pensions are getting robbed blind. Thirty years of unbroken compulsory contributions, in my case. Clearly, unless I die soon, I'll probably be re-defined as a burden to the state.

I hope I don't sound too angry, but sympathy (or obvious lack of it) is the very least of it. Hair shirts? It needs more than that to get all of us out of this mess. A bit of solidarity would help.

Hmm, not bizarre, just sadly inevitable, if a bit predictable. Somehow, it's always easier to criticise those who might seem to be a little bit better off than yourself than the rich and greedy bastards who caused the economic problems. The list will just get longer: those who may still have a permanent job with a contract and rights, may work in the public sector, may have lowish-rent social housing or receive housing benefit, a pension, or even still have savings.

It's little different from someone who is buying their own house caring little about the short-lease tenancies people in social housing are having forced on them. After all, they could have bought their own home when they had the chance, etc etc.

There's a lot of people around these parts who may not be part of any pension scheme (or feel they're old enough to worry about it), but they may well have older relations who do. Or may quickly realise the implications of their housing benefit being cut, for example.

My father was a civil servant, who started at the bottom and worked his way up (I stayed at the bottom for the short time I was in the civil service). He retired at 60, which was the standard retirement age for civil servants. I stand to be corrected (and surely will be if I'm wrong), but this may still apply to pre-July 2007 entrants [see below]. (The standard retirement age is not be confused with the compulsory retirement age - previously 65 - which has now been lifted.)

"- the Chancellor announced in June 2010 that civil service pensions will in future increase each year in line with the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), not the Retail prices Index (RPI). (If this rule had applied in the past then the pension of someone who had retired in 1988 would now be 15% less than it is.)- The average civil service pension was around £125 a week in 2009, reducing to around £56 a week for widows and widowers. These figures are broadly similar to the equivalent for the private sector, where the combined average (i.e. including widows etc.) was around £106 pw."

On the pre-July 2007 scheme:

"Pensions are inflation-proofed - that is they increase each year in line with prices (not wages). This feature is common in the funded sector, but those increases are not guaranteed if, for instance, inflation rises rapidly and/or the scheme runs into financial trouble. In contrast, the state's backing for the indexation of civil service pensions, which is in turn assisted by the absence of a specific pension fund, provides special security for civil service pensioners."

"The budgets of individual departments include employers' contributions to the PCSPS, and these contributions are now not only large in themselves, but have recently risen very quickly, up to an average of 19.4% in 2007."

"- Civil servants who had worked for 40 years could typically retire, under the 'Classic' pension scheme, on a pension of one half of their final salary, and also take a lump sum of 1.5 times their final salary. Later variations of the scheme, called 'Classic Plus' and 'Premium' offered somewhat better benefits, including greater flexibility between pension and lump sum, in return for higher contribution rates.

- The standard retirement age, for these schemes now closed to new entrants, is 60."

"Let's begin by comparing the pension of a civil servant in one of the lower grades with that of his/her equivalent in the private sector. Here, the main advantage is that civil service pay tends to increase with length of time in the job (even ignoring pay inflation), whereas many non-civil servants earn much the same just before they retire as when they are in their twenties. Other things being equal, therefore, many civil service employees will receive somewhat better pensions - based on their final salaries - than many in other final salary schemes. And of course the vast majority of private sector employees do not benefit from final salary schemes anyway. But it is important to remember that we are still talking about relatively low paid officials, so their pensions will hardly keep them in luxury. As noted above, the average pension was £6500pa in 2009."

"There are approaching 6 million public servants in the UK, but only around 10% of these are civil servants. Civil service pay therefore represents only a small fraction of total public sector pay. The vast majority of civil servants earn pretty much the same as their private sector counterparts. (At 31 March 2009, median gross annual earnings for all full time civil service employees were £22,100.) Senior civil servants, however, earn significantly less than their opposite numbers in the private sector."

"(with a tiny number of well-publicised exceptions, generally recruited from outside the civil service) the most senior civil servants are paid less than half of their private sector equivalents. But pay rates improve, relative to the private sector, the further one descends through the ranks, to the extent that the very lowest grades are paid about the same as their private sector counterparts. But it cannot be stressed too strongly that such pay nevertheless does remain low in absolute terms, as do the pensions that result from such low paid employment."

"Contributions to the premium scheme are only 3.5%, but the employer is charged another 22% on top, so this has to be taken into account when comparing civil service and other salaries."

"Over the longer term, civil service pay seems to track changes in the wider economy reasonably well. The most junior officials are currently paid around 50% to 60% of average UK salary, compared with around 40% to 70% in 1986. The equivalent figures for Executive Officers and their equivalents are 80-90% compared with 60-110% in 1986."

No, No, No.....I am just much too embarrassed to say how little the public sector pays me and how minute my pension will eventually be. The county council I work for is currently attempting to rewrite the pay and conditions book of its workers. Sick pay, London Weighting, holiday entitlement, overtime and redundancy rates are all heading south, and they are refusing to give the flat £250pa rise promised to people earning under £21k...."that's for civil servants not public sector workers."

(Reuters) - The government announced plans on Thursday to change the rate at which some private sector pensions are increased each year.

The move, which would affect defined benefit schemes, would bring private pensions in line with the public sector by linking annual increases to the consumer prices index measure of inflation rather than the retail prices index.

The government announced in an emergency budget on June 22 that from next year public service pensions and most benefits would increase in line with CPI.

CPI excludes housing costs such as mortgage interest payments, so is considered to be a more appropriate measure of inflation for pensioners but is also typically lower. "The government believes the CPI provides a more appropriate measure of pension recipients' inflation experiences and is also consistent with the measure of inflation used by the Bank of England," Pensions Minister Steve Webb said in a written statement to parliament.

"We believe, therefore, it is right to use the same index in determining increases for all occupational pensions."

The move should help under-pressure final salary schemes as it would link them to a lower rate of increase each year, reducing the liabilities they face.

Legislation introduced in 1995 required occupational pension schemes to increase pension payments in line with RPI to a maximum of 5 percent. This has since been reduced to a maximum of 2.5 percent.

The changes would also affect payments made by the Financial Assistance Scheme, which helps those who have lost out on their pension scheme because it was wound up, and the Pension Protection Fund, which compensates eligible members of pension schemes whose employer is insolvent, Webb said.

So it's not just civil service pensions that are in the Government's sights. This all has to be seen in the broader context of a pensions crisis that has been looming up for years, due to the simple fact that people are living longer and therefore drawing pensions for longer.

Neil Foxlee wrote:So it's not just civil service pensions that are in the Government's sights.

You don't say.

It's been going on for quite a few years now. Arguably the Civil Service is just starting to catch up with the private sector, and it's probably that which results in the lack of solidarity alluded to by Norman and Des. Many people are saying "why should civil servants' pensions be protected [by our taxes], when we have watched our pensions being eroded for the past decade and a half." I'm not saying they're right to look at it that way, but it's certainly not an uncommon mood, and it's one that the Coalition seems keen to exploit.

Given that the Government has been asking for its departments to come up with 25% or 40% cuts, however, the effect on both public services and civil service (and state sector) jobs is all too predictable. What the knock-on effect on the economy of these cuts and the VAT increase will be remains to be seen, but it's sure going to hurt. The prospect of a double-dip recession and another lost generation of young people beckons.

Neil Foxlee wrote:Given that the Government has been asking for its departments to come up with 25% or 40% cuts, however, the effect on both public services and civil service (and state sector) jobs is all too predictable. What the knock-on effect on the economy of these cuts and the VAT increase will be remains to be seen, but it's sure going to hurt. The prospect of a double-dip recession and another lost generation of young people beckons.

I agree - it's a savage, ideology-driven approach that betrays the fact that the government has no intention of driving market reform, or of offering any kind of stimulus to the economy. It's more important to them that we're better prepared for future, inevitable, worldwide financial shocks rather than actually trying to mitigate our exposure, and contribution, to such events. Meantime the cyclical nature of the economy will allow them to claim that the medicine is working in five years' time, even if we're in a worse state than a decade previously.

The attempts to eliminate pensions started at least 20 years ago. In the public sector - or at least in local government, it might have differed for the NHS, civil service, education sectors, etc - workers were given the option of moving from the centrally-run superannuation scheme to take on a 'private pension', that supposedly offered more, with lower contributions. This was linked more directly to the 'market' (my ' ' is sarcastic) and the returns looked much better but were not guaranteed, as subsequent developments have shown. It meant, in effect, that employers' contributions were lessened, which was to their advantage. Those local govt employees who changed over may now find themselves walking down the Yellow Mud Road, wondering why their lump sums have turned to dust.

The NHS is probably the largest public sector employer (is it larger than the military in personnel terms?). As a result of high levels of contracting out to private companies and employing staff on short-term and non-pensionable contracts over the last 20 years, the employers have once again saved themselves a bob or three.

In the private sector, the biggest - and still unresolved, as far as I know - pensions rip-off was when the Daily Mirror staff (existing pensioners and future retirees) found themselves robbed by the odious Robert Maxwell. What he had done, illegally, was what I am sure many bosses would like to do within the law - evade their contributions to any company pension plan and so maximise their profits.

Pensions are not free benefits. Workers pay for them. In my case, about 6 or 6.5% of my earnings over 30+ years. As far as some areas of public sector work are concerned, many retired workers may not live long enough to draw many years of their pension. In teaching - and I admit this to be anecdotal, though I have known a lot of teachers - many physically expire within just a few years of retirement. Raising the retirement age - or, putting it another way, making people work to an older age - will certainly reduce the "pension burden" for employers.

Without getting into the details of what's bothering Des and Norman ('cos I'm simply not well informed enough), I have to say that I think it's utterly unacceptable for the conditions of an employment contract to be changed after the work is done, i.e. if you were promised a pension, you should bloody well get it.

And I see no reason to prop up the banks, etc. who screwed things up. Are we going to have brutal capitalism or not? Or is this new situation another turn of the inherent brutality screw of that system?

However, it's also obvious that the clowns at the top simply didn't do their arithmetic correctly when it came to considering the effects of demographics — and then there are the crooks like Rupert Murdoch who rip off pension funds with merry abandon.

Beyond that, it seems to me that there's a general sense in society, once again, that the only people who matter are the young and upwardly mobile; the old codgers are devalued and cast aside. Ironically, it sort of reminds of elements of the 1960s in some ways, but I don't think there was quite the same predatory attitude back then.